In the prior art, bill validator and bezels were preassembled to one another and bill validators, with the bezel attached, were removed and replaced from a vending machine mounting plate having several threaded studs welded thereto by the removal and replacement of several locknuts from the studs. This procedure is time consuming and relatively complicated.
This bill validator and bezel attachment overcomes this problem in a manner not revealed by the known prior art.
In the prior art, vending machines were equipped with devices that take money like bill validator and coin changer. Acceptable denominations of bills and coins were usually determined by the vending machine controller based on the capability of the system to provide change in coins to the customer. The method was good when the average price of a product sold from a vending machine was less than a dollar and the only bill allowed was the $1 bill.
Now, with much higher product prices sold from vending machines, the vending machine operator allow the acceptance of $5 bill denominations. In general this allows for more products to be sold before vending machine service is needed. However, there are situations when a customer uses $5 to buy a low price product and a large amount of change has to be returned. The change is paid using bills from the stacker-dispenser box of the bill validator and/or coins from the tubes in the coin changer. If there are no bills in the stacker-dispenser box, change will be paid from the coins in the coin changer tubes. This will produce coin starvation, which the condition where the coin levels in the coin changer tubes will be greatly reduced or even depleted such that the controller will have to disable the acceptance of any bill and fewer vends can be made before service is required.
Furthermore, bill validators in the vending industry statically communicate the denominations of bills that accepted with information written on decals placed upon the bill acceptor. Therefore, when the controller has determined that it will no longer accept $5 bills due to an inability to make change, this information is not communicated to the consumer and the consumer is left to conclude that the vending machine is not working properly when his $5 bill is rejected. This leads to customer confusion and costly service calls.
The present bill validator and bezel attachment overcomes this problem in a manner not revealed by the known prior art. This proposed bill validator will disable the acceptance of the $5 bill any time the stacker-dispenser box or coin changer is empty and will communicate this to the customer using the display on the bill validator bezel. When there are insufficient bills and/or coins to make the required change, the vending machine controller will display on a vending machine display the “use exact change” message for customer instruction and only coins representing the exact amount of the price will be accepted. At the same time the display on the bill Validator bezel will display the allowed, bills if any, in the “use exact change” condition.
In the prior art, devices inside the vending machine like the vending machine controller, coin changer, bill validator, etc., communicate between themselves in order to accomplish the ultimate goal of delivering a product located inside the vending machine when the customer has established a credit larger than the price of the product he selected. The vending machine controller will control what bills or coins are acceptable so to be able to make the required change in case the credit was larger than the price of the selected product. This method does not resolve the issue of optimizing the total number of vends between service calls for a given amount of change located in the coin changer tubes and bill validator stacker-dispenser box.
Communication of the bill validator and bezel with the coin changer and the vending machine controller overcomes this problem in a manner not revealed by the known prior art. Data showing what bills and coins customers typically uses to make up a credit and what products are usually selected at particular credits are collected over a period of time, stored and analyzed. An optimization algorithm will decide when the acceptance of the $5 bill is a disabled or enabled function of the value and number of bills in the stacker-dispenser and coin tubes